by Emuna Elon
When he is assailed by hunger pangs, Yoel goes into his new room and nibbles rice crackers from the food package that Bat-Ami provided for him. On the corner of the table he places the electric kettle she had packed for him, the jar of instant coffee, and the ceramic mug, but he’s got no milk and he’ll have to go to the nearest supermarket that’s located—so Achilles had told him—beneath the square between the Stedelijk Museum of modern art and the Van Gogh Museum, right opposite the concert hall with the gold harp on its roof.
21
Like airports, hospitals, hotels, and banks, supermarkets look the same everywhere in the world and are laid out in accordance with the same universal systems as if they’ve been distributed all over the globe using the same diligent copy-paste. This one, too, is operated in exactly the same way as its duplicates wherever they may be, but of all the people in the world, only Yoel doesn’t know how to insert a coin to release a shopping cart from the line of carts chained to one another since it is Bat-Ami who usually takes care of his material needs at home and abroad, and it is she who releases a cart for him in every supermarket they go to.
In the past year he had decided to try to learn to share the household chores like today’s young couples do, and as part of that decision he had even accompanied his wife to the neighborhood supermarket once or twice, but even on that once or twice it had been her who had taken care of the technical details. All the more so when they were abroad, for then he was usually occupied with meetings with readers, literary lectures, and preparations for meetings with readers and for the literary lectures, whereas Bat-Ami’s time was hers to enjoy the beautiful places they visited, rummage in flea markets, and take care of their meals.
So with Bat-Ami not there he is standing inside the entrance to the supermarket and looking around ashamed and helpless because of his lack of this basic universal skill, until eventually a nice Dutch lady comes along and helps him to insert the right coin into the right slot and release a shopping cart just like everyone else. And he is on his way, wandering between the shelves and scanning the rows of foreign products, and he has no idea what they are since printed on each package is what it contains but it’s all in Dutch. Much later he is standing in line at the checkout, and in his cart are four huge cucumbers, a packet of cherry tomatoes, three apples, and a carton of milk that is perhaps not a carton of milk but a carton of something else that the Dutch pack in cartons that look like milk cartons.
* * *
On his way back to the hotel, the blue plastic supermarket bag in his hand, at the top of the street running from the concert hall to the small market square he passes a small café whose shutters are being raised at that very moment to welcome the new evening. According to what he’d read yesterday in the Amsterdam guidebook for the Israeli tourist that Bat-Ami had bought before their trip and without which she didn’t leave the hotel, this café is one of Amsterdam’s old “brown cafés,” so called because of the color of their interior walls, floors, and furniture, which are all made of natural brown wood. The brown café next to the Concertgebouw, says the guidebook, is famous for its well-known Dutch intellectuals, which include professors, writers, musicians, and theater people.
Yoel slowly walks by the lovely frontages of the houses whose backyards he had earlier looked at from his balcony in the Mokum Hotel. There are but few pedestrians in the narrow street, and most of the people passing are on bicycles or in cars. But in front of him on the sidewalk, her back to him, is a young woman and her two children. She is tall and sturdy in a tailored woolen coat, her flaxen hair is gathered above a strong nape, and her gait is erect and confident. He trails behind her and behind her little girl, whose blond hair is plaited into two thin braids, and she is walking beside her mother’s tall figure, holding on to the side of the baby stroller her mother is pushing, and from this rear angle and the distance between them he can’t see the face of the child in his checkered coat sitting in the stroller.
The woman’s legs are solid and strong, the little girl’s matchstick legs take two or three steps to each one of her mother’s, and the wheels of the stroller turn and turn. Yoel hears the pleasing sounds of the conversation between mother and daughter, he hears the wheels turning and the baby’s burbling as they pass the building housing the psychoanalyst’s clinic, and they walk as far as the midpoint between the brown café and the market square and stop there. From her purse the woman takes a key and inserts it into the front door lock. Yoel slows as she opens the door wide, tells the little girl to go inside before her, and then wheels the stroller inside and goes in too. And the door closes.
Yoel approaches the house and sees that the threshold is covered by fallen red leaves. Red ivy climbs beside the front door and the leaves that fall from it pile in the entrance like a puddle of blood.
* * *
Opening sentence of the story:
Sonia goes into the house without treading on the red autumn leaves piled in the doorway.
THIRD NOTEBOOK
22
Sonia goes into the house without treading on the red autumn leaves piled in the doorway. Eddy had smiled when he noticed it this morning and suggested that he get a broom from their apartment and clear the way for her. But Sonia, also smiling, asked him to leave the leaves, and her, alone. This autumnal message makes me happy, she told him. And fallen leaves aren’t dirt, Edika. You have to admit that the threshold looks much lovelier with this colorful garb than without it.
She steers Nettie into the hallway, comes inside with the stroller, closes the door, and descends the steep staircase with both hands gripping the metal handle of the heavy stroller as it bounces in front of her, step after step. Nettie follows her down, counting the steps in English as her father had taught her only yesterday. Eddy is always teaching the child new skills, and Sonia thinks that it’s perhaps a good thing that he’s away from home so much. If he spent more hours with them, the little girl wouldn’t have time to be little.
Apart from this point she doesn’t find anything positive in the fact that Eddy works sixteen hours a day at the hospital and sometimes even more. They’d moved here a short time after she’d become pregnant with Leo, and she thought that the proximity to the Jewish hospital would give them more time together. The high rents in this area meant they could only rent this small basement apartment in Anouk’s parents’ house, and Eddy’s increased presence in the life of their small family was supposed to make up for the decline in the quality of their housing. But it quickly became clear to her that the proximity to Eddy’s place of work didn’t increase the amount of time he spent with her and the children, but ate away at it even more. It seemed that the news that the brilliant young doctor lived so close to the hospital, right round the corner in fact, led his employers to think that he should spend all day and all night in the internal medicine ward. Every new patient, or a change in the condition of a not new patient, was grounds for them to call him back to the ward, even when only a short time had elapsed since he had completed a long, fatiguing shift and had finally gone home. When she plucked up her courage and went to see the hospital director, Professor Sherman, to complain about it, he had looked at her pityingly. I most definitely understand you, he said. Though I’m sure that you of all people, dear Sonia, a former staff member here and who will apparently be one in the future too, are prepared for a degree of personal sacrifice for the success of our important hospital and for its good name. Especially in these times that are difficult for all of us.
* * *
Maybe we were mistaken, she thinks now as she takes off Nettie’s and her own coat. Maybe we shouldn’t have moved here.
She takes Leo’s coat off last, and only then the baby breaks his silence and lets out a weak wail.
You’re a good boy, too good, you know? she says as she takes him out of the stroller, clasps him to her bosom, and lays him down on the bed to change his diaper. You’re allowed to cry, she whispers into his blue eyes, which are gazing at her with complete trust,
you’re allowed to, my treasure, especially when you’re as hungry as you are right now.
Nettie, who had hurried to her wooden dollhouse in the corner of the room as soon as they got into the apartment, comes over to stand next to her as she sits down to nurse Leo. I’m going to give my babies only breast milk too, she announces.
You’ll be a good mother. Sonia smiles at her. You’ll be a wonderful mother.
23
Yoel makes himself a cup of coffee and goes out onto the balcony again, back to the two rows of houses below, to them and their backyards. Daylight is slowly fading; in the windows electric lights come on and figures flit in the lighted windows.
In the big window to the right the restless psychoanalyst is still bent over her keyboard, over her mountains of papers and files and over the minds of her clients.
She types something quickly and leans back, stretching her tired arms sideways, reads what she has written on the screen and her shoulders reveal dissatisfaction.
* * *
There is now light in the closer window to the left, and he can see some of the framed paintings hanging on the wall there. He can also see that the low, wide piece of furniture under the pictures is indeed a stylized chest of drawers, and that exhibited on it are various statuettes and objets d’art, in the center of which, most surprisingly, still lies the same thin, light-colored dog, a dog that looks amazingly similar to a fox or jackal, its long tail folded beside its haunch and its look directed at the writer standing on the balcony of his hotel room and looking right back at it.
A young man dressed in black comes trippingly into the gleaming white kitchen on the lower floor. His slim body moves as if in a graceful dance as he fills a white kettle and, with the same dance movements, picks up the white bowl that was upside down on the white drainer, places it on the white work surface, and piles some vegetables next to it. From a white drawer he takes a white knife and starts chopping a perfect red tomato on a white cutting board.
The church bell chimes six times. In the right-hand row of houses, Yoel tries to locate the house whose door had swallowed the woman who had earlier been walking in front of him with her little girl and her baby. He thinks she went into the house in the middle of the row, so he stands on his balcony and looks as hard as he can at the middle house and says to himself quietly: That’s the house. That’s the house. Slowly and painstakingly, his eyes glide over the small red bricks that the five stories of that house are built of and pass over its white window frames. They reach the chimney rising from the corner of the roof, its plume of smoke curling into the endless sky.
* * *
Bathed and sated, Leo had fallen asleep a short time after the bell of Our Lady chimed six times. Sonia wants to read Nettie a bedtime story and get her to sleep too before the nightly argument between the enemy’s antiaircraft batteries and the British bombers begins.
It looks like Eddy won’t be coming home tonight either. It was good that she’d managed to pop into the hospital while Nettie was in school, leave Leo with one of her friends in the surgical unit, and drag Eddy away from his work for a short while. They didn’t waste this precious meeting on talk but simply sat together at the far end of Eddy’s department, smoking their cigarettes quietly and stealing a few minutes of intimacy as if they didn’t have a common roof under which they could meet, as if they didn’t have two beautiful children he’d given her in love, and as if they were still the same youngsters struck by mutual attraction that they’d been when they first met.
Now she and Nettie are sitting in the kitchenette of the basement apartment, chatting amiably about the day that was and the day that will be and eating their supper of thin lentil soup and potatoes. In the long, low window that meets the ceiling above the dining table and their two heads, every now and then they see the feet of passersby on the sidewalk.
A door slams on the top floor of the building and right away mother and daughter exchange the amused smile of people sharing a secret. After the sound of the slam comes, as expected, the delicate pitter-patter of feet hurriedly descending the stairs, down and down until they come to a stop on their floor. A knuckled knock on the door and Sonia gets up, opens it, and pretends surprise as she calls out: Anouk!
Anouk bursts in. Her face is pale and in her arms she is carrying a rolled woolen blanket from which a tiny pair of feet is dangling.
Och, dear Sonke, she pants. I’m so sorry to disturb you again in the middle of your family meal.…
Why is she saying “family meal”? Sonia thinks. Can’t she see it’s just me and Nettie?
It’s alright, she replies, you’re not disturbing us, and right away, as if an automatic mechanism has been activated in her, Anouk bursts into sobs. I’m so frightened, she explains, and all at once a cascade of tears covers her lovely porcelain cheeks. I think that this time Sebastian’s dangerously ill.… Martin tells me to calm down, he doesn’t consider my feelings at all… but I’m so worried. I don’t know what I’d do without you.…
Sonia unrolls the blanket and takes her neighbor’s son in her arms. She feels, as she does each time she holds him, how bony and stiff his body is compared with the soft and pliant body of her beloved Leo. And a familiar feeling of compassion for little Sebastian rises in her because of the anxiety with which his mother constantly surrounds him and also because of how he looks: Sebastian Rosso, she thinks, seems to be the least cute child in the world, and without doubt the least cute child she has ever seen. Babies, like the helpless young of other animals, usually have sweet, rounded faces that arouse an instinctive feeling of sympathy and a desire to protect them and care for them. Only Sebastian Rosso has a long, pinched face, a large nose, and small, grave eyes. His face actually looks to her like that of an old man and remarkably similar to the face of Anouk’s father, the banker de Lange. At this moment his pinched face grows paler, the little eyes darken as they look at her, the narrow lower lip curls, and Sebastian—even though he ostensibly knows her well from his frequent visits with his hypochondriac mother—fixes her with his little eyes and bursts into horrific screams that make Nettie jump up from her chair and from her plate of food, and wake Leo from his sleep.
* * *
Eddy and Martin had met at medical school and remained friends even after Martin quit medicine in the middle of his third year and transferred to philosophy studies.
Martin would visit Eddy and Sonia after they got married and Sonia loved listening to his original thoughts on the meaning of Man’s existence in the midst of the great chaos. She tried her hand at matchmaking between him and the smartest and most profound of her friends, but Martin found no interest in the girl. And how surprised Sonia and Eddy were when he knocked on their door one evening and with him was the beautiful, cheerful daughter of wealthy parents: Anouk de Lange.
Martin and Anouk married and lived on the top floor of her parents’ house. When Sonia and Eddy told them they were financially unable to rent an apartment near the Jewish hospital, Anouk suggested that they take the newly vacant basement apartment at particularly low rent.
By the time Sonia manages to quiet Anouk and her son and reassure Anouk that her son isn’t dying but just has a slight chill, Leo is wide awake. The soup on the table is already cold. And after Anouk finally wraps her screaming bundle in its blanket and goes back up to her own apartment, the nightly air raid starts to fill the city with explosions and flashes of flame. Sonia snuggles under the bedclothes with her two children and hugs them to her with all her might, clasping their little bodies to her as if trying to fuse them into herself and turn the three of them into one.
24
Yoel goes out into the night, walks to the nearest tram stop, and gets on the first tram that comes along. After six or seven stops, in a flash decision, he gets off at Dam Square and finds himself standing outside the Royal Palace, on whose roof stands a sculpture of Atlas bearing the weight of his eternal burden. He wants to be swallowed up in the crowds of people in the square, most of whom are young
sters walking or standing in couples or small groups, laughing and talking, and as they pass him he hears fragments of their conversations, many of them in Hebrew. That was really something, someone says to someone else in Hebrew. We’ve already been to Van Gogh, says someone to someone else in Hebrew. And one voice in a group of youngsters crossing the square in the opposite direction asks in Hebrew: How can you know? And the question goes off with that group but continues resonating in Yoel’s ear, for truly, how can you know. How.
He approaches the somber National Monument in the middle of the square and he doesn’t feel good, he doesn’t feel good. He can’t remember if he ever felt good, and in the dark he can’t find the numerals that, according to the Israeli tourist guidebook, should be engraved on the back of the monument in commemoration of the years that Amsterdam was under foreign occupation. He looks at the stone lions crouched heavily on both sides of the monument, and it seems to him that they are opening their huge stone mouths not in a terrifying roar but in a wide, tired, dreary yawn.
He wants to be swallowed up so he flows along with the crowd from the square into one of the alleys leading off it and drifts onward until he is stopped in panic by a display window encircled with red light bulbs and his face flushes as if he is an adolescent boy. Of course he had read and heard about Amsterdam’s red light district, but he is totally shocked in that fleeting moment when he sees—just out of the corner of his eye, but sees—that it really is the figure of a woman standing in the window surrounded by red lights, standing like a product for sale, and this window is only one of a series of more red windows like it, and in that same blink of an eye Yoel hurries away and flees and now he’s at the door of a small, dimly lit bar, and a waiter hands him a flyer with a menu, and Yoel glances at it and realizes that the small, dimly lit bar is a local coffee shop, a place for smoking drugs, and he lays the flyer on a table, stammers an apology, and flees.